Die!Die!Die! review for PS Vita

Without any exaggeration, I can confidently state that Die!Die!Die! might just be the most boring game I’ve ever played. It has some serious competition from the PS3 version of Planet 51 (sample mission: you mow the lawn), but at least that had the excuse of being a cash-in for a kids movie. Die!Die!Die! was made just for the PS Vita, and itzzzzz…sorry, I nodded off for a second there.

I mean, I didn’t right at that moment (obviously), but I really did fall asleep playing the game. And not just once, either; it happened to me twice, and one of those times was right in the middle of the afternoon. That should tell you all you need to know about Die!Die!Die!

Still need to know more? Well fine, how about this: Die!Die!Die! bills itself as the Vita’s “first medical defence game”. That, apparently, is code for “tower defense with one tower that never moves”. All you do is aim at and shoot germs for the whole game. The enemies change a little bit, but apart from the final stages, they’re all killed in the same way. And even in that final stage, all you have to do is colour coordinate your shots — it’s not as if you need to plan or strategize anything. Occasionally the invading germs move a little faster, but never so quickly that you seriously need to worry about doing a level over again. This is a game where everything you need to know, you can figure out in the first few seconds. And then you get to do that same thing over, and over, and over, and over, and ovzzzz…whoops, sorry again.

There are a few “twists”, I guess, if you want to call them that. The game randomly throws power-ups on the screen, but it’s up to you to figure out how to pick them up and what they do — though, in the interest of fairness, I’ll note that it doesn’t take enormous amounts of brainpower to figure out you pick them up by touching them. In any case, it’s not as if they’re hugely necessary in the vast majority of the levels — since, again, the only thing you have to do in this game is aim and shoot. On a different note, the game also includes a survival mode. The survival mode is the exact same thing as the campaign mode, except it doesn’t have any kill or time limits, so it just goes on forever, in case you’re a masochist and you want to prolong the agony experience of Die!Die!Die. It’s endless waves of germs, floating across the screen in the same path, in the same direction, with the same background. My eyes are getting heavy just thinking about it.

If you’re looking for positives…well, keep looking. The music isn’t just grating, it’s also repetitive. The visuals are kind of colorful, but they inhabit some weird space between cute and gross that’s best classified as straight-up ugly. And to top it all off, Die!Die!Die! is $5; while that may be the PSN equivalent of a 99 cent mobile game, it’s still $4 more than an actual 99 cent mobile game — and, let’s face it, there are loads of cheap and free mobile games that are more interesting and have more content than Die!Die!Die!

Of course, it’s hard not to have more content than Die!Die!Die!, because — and I’ll emphasize this one last time — this is a tower defense game where you have one tower that never moves and you shoot at enemies that only come from one direction. It may not be the worst game on the Vita (though it’s certainly in that conversation, too), but it’s unquestionably the most boring, and for that reason — unless you’re in desperate need of a sleep aid — you should steer well clear of Die!Die!Die!